The
Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to
Buffy

London:
Wallflower Press (2005). ISBN 1-904764-41-1 (pbk), pp. 212

Particip@tions Volume 2, Issue 2 (December 2005)

A
Review by Martin Barker

Milly Williamson has written a brave,
wide-ranging and original book about the meanings and significance
of vampire fandom. Based on some rich and fascinating research with
fans both in London, and around the Ann Rice Lestat Vampire Fan Club
in New Orleans, this book is very much one – and in my view one of
the best – of the second wave of fan studies, which moves beyond the
celebratory mode of thinking about fans that Henry Jenkins has
famously developed. Her study is also based on a grasp of an
exceptionally wide range of other work: from the history of vampire
fiction itself, along with the range of approaches to the gothic and
melodrama; through fan studies themselves – and a stringent critique
of Jenkins is mounted in here – to a striking reconsideration of the
work, and relevance, of Pierre Bourdieu for this field. I recommend
the book very highly, as the foregoing sentences must hint. But it
does have, to my eye, two lacunae which puzzle and bother me.

At the outset, Williamson revisits the
history of vampire literature, moving beyond standard histories
which put at their centre Bram Stoker’s contribution, to look
instead at the history of sympathetic vampires. She traces the
reasons why such figures might have been attractive to working class
audiences, and to women especially – because of the fears, rampant
across the nineteenth century, of medical invasions of the body.
Not just grave-robbers, but also the medical ‘theft’ of the bodies
of criminals, the insane, the poor whose bodies could be cut up, put
on display, used as public evidence. The sources of this tradition
are older than Stoker, in for example the popular part-novel
Varney The Vampire. But the impact of this implies that even
Stoker’s book, once encountered, might be read differently. Those
most fearing such defiling of their bodies might see the
stake-wielding Van Helsing who effectively also autopsies Lucy’s
body less as a ‘good father’ than as a threat:

Large numbers of working class
Victorians probably would not have read Dracula as soon as it
was published, because the first-edition hardback copy would have
been too expensive … However the publisher, Constable, brought out
a paperback edition three-and-a-half years later in 1901 that was
aimed at a less affluent readership … I would like to suggest that
Dracula may have been read by a poor, working class and
female audience rather differently to the dominant discourses as
represented by the Crew of Light [the four young vampire hunters of
Stoker’s book], not only because of the tale’s divergence from
Varney, but because of these groups’ attitudes towards, and
experience of, the medical establishment that the Crew of Light
represent. (21-2)

This rewriting of the history is
intriguing, and valuable in its own right. It clearly has in part
to be speculative (and there are quite a few ‘may haves’ and ‘could
haves’ in Williamson’s account as a result) since the evidence on
who in that period read stories such as Varney the Vampire,
and even more in what ways they read them, is inevitably thin. But
it does offer the possibility of bringing contemporary fan studies
into touch with the growing interest in the history of reading, in a
potentially very productive way.

With almost one bound, then, Williamson
does then leap forward to more contemporary examples, notably TV
shows such as Dark Shadows, films such as The Lost Boys,
and of course Buffy. On the basis of a series of fan
interviews, she brings into view more aspects of this notion of the
sympathetic vampire – showing indeed that it operates as a kind of
filter for fans, sorting good from bad aspects of programmes, and
even on occasion providing programme makers with a key to future
developments – the development of Spike, the ambiguously charged
character in Buffy, was clearly a response to his unexpected
popularity with fans.

She then mounts a very substantial
critique of the ways in which fan studies have appropriated the work
of Bourdieu. Her argument is that this appropriation diminishes and
caricatures Bourdieu’s work, to a thin distinction between
‘distanced’ high culture associated with high status/upper class
culture; and participative, and immediate ‘popular culture’.
Rather, she argues, Bourdieu’s work emphasises conflicts within
dominant culture, between those sectors celebrating ‘culture for its
own sake’, and those involved in the production of commercial
culture. There is a running conflict between the two. The
implication of this is that popular participative culture cannot be
characterised in itself as either progressive or conservative – that
depends on the particular relations of force within a field
at any time. Along with this re-evaluation of Bourdieu, Williamson
looks at fan studies itself, and in particular the work of Henry
Jenkins. She points up not only what others have addressed – the
unsatisfactory populism to which he is prone – but also the ways in
which he sidesteps the issues of power within fandom. Fan
organisation is not, she argues, as Jenkins presents it an
autonomous, democratic space. Rather it is thoroughly caught up in
the commercial imperatives of the makers and distributors of these
cultural forms, and their institutional apparatuses.

On the back of this critique, she turns
to an examination of the Ann Rice Fan Club. This is to my eyes
really original and important work, albeit constraints of space have
meant that sometimes arguments get to be based on single quotations
from interviews (I hope Williamson will find an opportunity to
publish a fuller account of these materials, since they look so
interesting.). On the basis of fieldwork in New Orleans, she
presents an account of the fan club, particularly via an internal
conflict over a Ball which was officially organised – in a way that
led many unofficial fans to feel excluded, and cheated. What
Williamson does so well, is to elucidate what we might call the
‘rules of belonging’. The official fans, those with links to the
Ann Rice Fan Club, are shown to have to learn rules of respectful
distance from Rice herself, whilst they talk dismissively about the
‘obsessive’ fans outside their circle. I must say that I
immediately recognised these kinds of talk, from the time I spent
inside the world of comic book fans. The operation of inner and
outer circles here takes on a new significance.

All this is excellent. But I was bugged
by two issues, which may be linked. The first, is Williamson’s
tendency to talk in very categorical ways of ‘gender’ as the
distinctive component. The second, is a too light treatment of what
is to me a key question also ignored in Jenkins: just what is it
that fans enjoy in their materials? To take each in turn.

The issue of gender categories came most
in view for me in her very interesting chapter on vampire fans and
dress. This chapter, drawing heavily on the work of Elizabeth
Wilson, argues that to understand the use of alternative modes of
dress by women vampire fans (and male fans do just drop almost
entirely out of view here) we need to grasp the context that women’s
lives are permeated by awareness that their bodies are under
inspection all the time. The choice of dress, therefore, is always
a response to this inspection. Drawing on interviews, she discusses
the central choice of Black as a form of refusal, a choice of
defiant visibility. This is certainly interesting, as a general
account. But it leaves me unsatisfied on two grounds. First, I gain
little sense of what kinds of women do this. This is surely
important if we are to consider the cultural significance and
consequences of vampire fandoms. Is this a cross-class phenomenon?
Does it peak at certain points in women’s lives? Is it associated
with particular social situations of women – being single, having
been through divorces, etc? Or are there ways of characterising
them in terms of motivation, belief system, or cultural
orientation? The risk of not asking questions of this kind is a
retreat to a sort of gender essentialism, which would make it hard
to see why vampire fandom is a minority choice. Not just this, but
I also find myself noting, what does not appear to be noticed by
Williamson herself, an oddity within the interview responses. Her
evidence shows that the women who most self-consciously choose Black
as an expressive form, choose it in opposition to Pink. Of course,
Pink is the most gender-marked colour in contemporary culture. But
it is also to a considerable extent a fantasy culture,
closely associated for instance with young girls’ strong first
adoption of femaleness. It is certainly not a required, or a
dominant colour choice among adult women. It is a conception
of femininity. And I wonder what that says about the nature of the
opposition within which vampire fans are constituting their
identities.

My other puzzlement/concern revolves
around a central question that I still feel, at the end of the book,
is ducked: just what the nature of the pleasure is that
associates with the idea of vampirism. Williamson describes very
well the nature of the groups within which the fandom operates. She
gives striking accounts of the self-presentations of fans,
especially women. She writes interestingly (if to me less
convincingly, because I couldn’t see what the principles of
selection were) about fan fiction. But not about the pleasures of
the reading and watching in themselves. So, for instance, if
unofficial fans become pissed off enough with Ann Rice and her fan
club to walk out of a Ball in which they have invested large amounts
of money, what keeps them coming back to the stories? This is a
core issue. Vampirism is about good and bad bodies. It is about
biting and sucking. It is about penetration and hurting of bodies.
It is about a fantastical afterlife/eternity. Her final chapter
comes closest to discussing this, but to me never quite gets there.
And I sense that there is a hesitation at the end of the road, which
connects with her hesitation in the chapter on fan fiction. There
is a distinct unwillingness to engage with the pornographic elements
of fan fiction, the sheer eroticism of the idea of the vampire, its
sexual perversity.

The point where Williamson comes nearest
to exploring this, is also the point where a component of the very
approach she has so powerfully criticised appears to me to creep
into her own approach. She is discussing the nature and role of fan
fiction within vampire fandom, and in particular around Buffy
where, interestingly, it appears to have been more tolerated, if not
encouraged, by the show’s producers. In a brief discussion of the
kinds of stories that are produced, Williamson acknowledges that a
good deal of it is not only sexually explicit and detailed, but sets
out to depict perverse and violent sexual encounters. Williamson
comments on this:

It seems that many of the slash stories
based on Buffy characters are primarily intended to sexually
arouse the reader through the graphic depiction of forbidden and
polymorphous sexual encounters. Much of the writing in Buffy
slash fiction is pornographic, whether it is nice to admit it or
not. I am not suggesting that this makes slash unacceptable
politically, for I concur with Penley that slash exists as imaginary
sexual encounters and not real ones. But neither is slash simply to
be celebrated; it is hard to celebrate erotically depicted rape and
torture sequences even if they are only fantasy. (173-4)

This reads oddly to me. It is odd for
three reasons. First, it takes ‘pornography’ to constitute some
overriding categorisation. If stories function to arouse sexually,
then that in some way overbears all other functions. But that is a
historically specific conception of pornography, and one which I
would want to contest. Second, it operates with a rather bald
fantasy/reality distinction. Either such stories are ‘only’
fantasy, or they are real – and thank goodness they are not the
latter. This is a very diminished notion of the nature of the
social imaginary. Third, it returns to a rather Jenkins-ish
framework, of trying to decide if this is ‘progressive’ or not.
Aside from a wish to question the notion of some singular dimension
here (‘progressive’ to ‘conservative’ maps rather too closely for
comfort onto the categories of current American party politics), I
am unwilling to join in this rush to make judgements.

Suppose we put it differently.
Vampirism itself is not read in this mode. Taken literally,
vampirism supposes a minority of people who bite innocent citizens,
drain their blood, kill many and infect others in the process. Well
thank goodness that is ‘only fantasy’. But of course Williamson’s
whole argument is charged with making this opposition look too
easy. Vampiric stories are a form of cultural imaginary, complexly
formed, in and through which conceptions of the body are put in
play. The real worth of her book is her explication of many of the
processes involved in this. But something in our culture resists us
carrying that through to talk about sex stories (‘pornography’0 as a
similarly complex cultural imaginary. And I think it disables the
possibility of understanding the pleasure-dynamics of the vampire.

These critical debates aside, I loved
this book. It is a major contribution to the field of fan studies,
but with implications going way beyond that field.

Postscript: Hurricane
Katrina, Anne Rice and her fans

While I was writing this review, it
occurred to me to think about the ways in which Hurricane Katrina
had impacted on fans of Anne Rice. Given that she and her novels
are so firmly based in New Orleans, what had she said? How did she
respond to the disaster, and its political fallout from it? This is
surely a relevant question to ask, given the debates (to which Milly
Williamson’s book makes such an important contribution) about the
so-called ‘progressiveness’ of fan cultures. What if the
radicalism, in as much as it is there, were entirely internal to the
fantastical story-worlds which provokes fans’ interests? Given the
reorientation Williamson proposes, to the hierarchical management of
fan communities, in which the ‘voice of the author’ carries more
authority than many other researchers have conceded, Anne Rice,
Katrina and its aftermath offers a potentially very interesting
case-study.

What I
found in the course of a fairly cursory web search was
thought-provoking. Rice wrote about Katrina regularly in her
web-diary. Her comments range from some which are deeply
self-involved (‘I am sure my fans would want to know that my late
husband’s art collection is safe and well’) to more generalised
comments on the scale and impact of the disaster. What is striking
is the ways in which her persona spilled into a statement which Rice
released. In this widely quoted and recycled statement, Rice
essentially denounces the ‘American public’ for letting New Orleans
down. In May 2005 she wrote an opinion piece for the New York
Times, which talked powerfully about the nature of the suffering
in the city, and explained why so many ordinary people were unable
to flee the hurricane. It ended “But to my country I want to say
this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you
dismissed our victims; you dismissed us,” Rice wrote. “You want our
Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our
music,” she continued. “Then when you saw us in real trouble, when
you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us
‘Sin City,’ and turned your backs.”

There is not one word, as far as I could
find it, about George Bush, or the Republican Administration, or the
systemic failures/racism of the rescue efforts. From the heights of
her status, and from the safety of her home in California, Rice sets
herself as spokesperson of the ‘ordinary suffering peoples’, and who
welcomed Bill Clinton in almost fawning terms:

It fills me with
relief and hope to see President Clinton working so hard with the
survivors of the storm. This man emanates compassion and
understanding. Let me express my dream here that he will remain
actively involved in helping the gulf coast come back. He is a
brilliant and insightful man, full of love for his fellow Americans,
and his words are a constant inspiration. Thank you, President
Clinton. Please, please stay with the South and help it rebuild.
With love, Anne Rice. (October 2005)

A number of blogger and other responses
show the anger her statement aroused in some (including of course
some rightwing writers). What I couldn’t find out, and what would be
really interesting to know, is the responses of her fans – the
official and the unofficial, the local, national and international,
to this piece of gratuitous ‘position-taking’ by Anne Rice. It
would be a logical extension of Williamson’s ideas, and I am
grateful that she provoked me to think to ask this.